Sugar Shock

This is something of a secondary WLW post, as it's one of those scattered thoughts I wanted to write about, but didn't really flow with Wednesday's post. So instead, I blog about it here.

During my usual scanning through the newswires earlier this week, I came across a little story about the sugar in kid's breakfast cereals. The headline really grabbed me (as headlines are supposed to, duh) as it said "Sugary cereals are like serving dessert for breakfast".

Now, for those who haven't been following my get-healthy endevours, I quit sugar back in June (I've since fallen off the wagon several times, but that's not the point here) and one of the big things I had to give up was cereal. Those aforementioned sugary cereals.

See, I love junky cereal. Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Golden Grahams, the list goes on and on. And I would just eat them for breakfast – I'd eat them for before-bed snacks as well. In total I probably ate something like four or five bowls a day. And I'm not talking four or five actual serving sizes either. Like a decent size bowl filled to the brim.

Turns out I was likely eating the equivalent of a box a Twinkies a day. And I couldn't figure out why I was fat? Fuck, I am stupid some days.

Cereal doesn't have a lot of calories in respect to a lot of food, so I figured it wasn't that bad for me. It's not like I was eating four or five cheeseburgers a day. But the calorie count was all I was taking into consideration – I didn't even look at the sugar.

Sugar makes your ass get bigger!

An excess of sugar is actually what caused me to get up into the 230 range. Someone convinced me that drinking diet pop was a bad idea – aspartame is the devil and all that shit – so I figured, okay, I just drink regular pop. What I should have figured was I shouldn't drink pop at all, but no, I went with the former.

So I started with the regular pop. Not much a first, once a week maybe. But then I started drinking it as often as I drank diet pop. You know what the difference between regular pop and diet pop? About 41 grams of sugar (and something like 150 calories per can). I would drink a two litre bottle to myself in one evening. That is a seriously fucked up amount of of sugar. Between the pop and the cereal, it's no goddamn wonder I'd gotten so fat!

When I did tip the scale at 235 pounds, I made the decision to go cold turkey with my sugar addiction. I quit the cereal, and that was probably the hardest thing I did. I haven't had cereal at all in six months.

And you know what? I don't really miss it. Periodically I walk down the cereal aisle at the grocery store, just to look, but I don't feel any desire to pick out a box. It's actually astounding how much milk I went through when I used to eat cereal – now I don't even bother buying milk because I don't actually drink it. It just goes bad.

Now if I could just get around to throwing out those old half empty boxes of cereal that are sitting in my pantry...